ESC-Partners SAIL Foundation and Fundamentals Academy pleased with collaboration

Students come up with creative designs for their minor Co-Design to make SAIL more sustainable

Students at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, under the guidance of Fundamentals Academy, spent two weeks doing Co-Design for SAIL, a major maritime event in Amsterdam. For their minor Co-Design, the aim was to come up with creative design proposals for making the five-yearly event more sustainable. Elisabeth de Jong of SAIL Foundation and Jens Gijbels of Fundamentals Academy look back on a successful collaboration.

“I was positively surprised by the results achieved in a fortnight with Systemic Co-Design (SCD),” Elisabeth says. “The students came up with good and concrete ideas of which elements can be implemented. With some concepts, the feasibility was a bit lower, but always very creative.” According to Jens, it was quite a challenge to come up with valuable results in just a fortnight. “SAIL is a huge event and has quite a few complexities that make it tough. There are multiple stakeholders, many things we don’t know and have no control over.”

Two steps
For instance, one of the biggest challenges for this project is that SAIL takes place in public space. There is no fence around the site. “For example, you have a sustainable burger joint next to a traditional snack bar and that makes making SAIL sustainable difficult,” Jens explains. To provide structure, he worked with the students in two steps. “First, we mapped what the customer needed and looked at other places and events. For example, what pre-existing initiatives and examples could we find at other festivals or similar events? And step two, if we knew what alternatives were, how could we come up with new perspectives.”

ESC workshops
According to Jens, the workshops that ESC ran during the minor most definitely helped the students to move forward. “Especially the workshops ‘Mapping the System’ and ‘Positive Provocations’ were specific and immediately applicable. These contained elements that students could work with straight away and you can see that in their proposals.” But Elisabeth also liked the method of presentation. “The visual presentation was very inspiring for our programmer and me.”

Educational for all
Next time, however, facilitating the conversations between the client and the students better and asking more specific questions in sessions, may even lead to better results, according to Elisabeth. “At the same time, students plunged into a broad issue using many different methodologies in a very short time”, Elisabeth says. “I found the methodology very interesting and insightful. For us as clients, but also for the students, I think this was absolutely educational.”

Rollercoaster
This is something Jens confirms wholeheartedly. “I notice that students realise more and more what they achieved in those two weeks. It was a rollercoaster and only now is it starting to sink in.” For such a big event as SAIL, two weeks is a bit short, but Jens sees enormous added value for both SAIL and his students. “They talked to the organisation, looked at similar events and came up with new interesting perspectives. And remember that students often work with organisations that don’t do this themselves. At least not yet,” he adds, laughing.